The bluenose brigade at the Motion Picture Association of America has stamped “Red Riding Hood” with a PG-13 rating for “violence and creature terror, and some sensuality.” Certainly this goofily amusing screen fairy tale includes bloodshed, but it’s generally tamer than its often-gruesome source. The creature terror meanwhile isn’t remotely frightening, though the designated mustache twirler (and scene chewer) Gary Oldman tries to rustle up scares. As to sensuality, Amanda Seyfried as You-Know-Who makes a delectable treat whether heaving her bosom or boogieing down in a bacchanal that’s more Burning Man than Bruegel.

At this point in her short movie career Ms. Seyfried hasn’t often been asked to do more than hit her marks and deliver her lines, which she does appealingly in “Red Riding Hood.” What she mostly brings to her movies is otherworldly, unthreatening beauty — she has the saucer eyes and heart-shaped face of an anime pixie — and that elusive gift of cinematic presence. When she’s on camera, she draws all eyes to her, something that the director here, Catherine Hardwicke, grasps. Ms. Hardwicke is an uneven, at times careless filmmaker, but as she showed in movies like “Thirteen” and the first “Twilight,” she is attuned to beauty and has a way with young actors, tapping their energy so it buzzes on screen.

From the start Ms. Hardwicke tries to make the case that this isn’t your granny’s favorite fairy tale. The story opens with its heroine, Valerie, as a child (Megan Charpentier), strolling about in trousers (the other girls are in dresses) while in voice-over Ms. Seyfried insists that she tried to be a good girl. But goodness had nothing to do with it, as Mae West once quipped, or so Ms. Hardwicke seems to want us to believe. Before long Valerie has run off with a boy pointedly named Peter (first D J Greenburg, later Shiloh Fernandez with hair gel), and they’re frolicking in the forest and snaring a rabbit. Valerie urges Peter to slay the animal, but he can’t or won’t, and the sequence ends with her holding a knife to the bunny like a natural-born killer.

The suggestion that Red Riding Hood might be as much predator as prey isn’t new. She may be the intended victim, but she’s also the one who (after sizing up the wolf in bed) ends triumphant. It’s this blurring between the antagonists as well as the flexibility of the story’s morals and meanings that make it work well for different readers and writers. In the 17th century Charles Perrault turned an oral folk tale into “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge,” and three centuries later Angela Carter gave the story a wicked, feminist spin. Ms. Hardwicke doesn’t acknowledge “The Company of Wolves,” Carter’s brilliant retelling, but it’s probable that she read it or saw Neil Jordan’s dreary 1984 big-screen adaptation.

But, my, what sharp teeth Ms. Hardwicke doesn’t have: working from David Leslie Johnson’s screenplay she takes on the story’s grown-up themes of sex and death directly but weakly. This might be because the movie has been pitched at young adults, as evidenced by its pretty leads, electronic soundtrack, contemporary vibe and veneer, and caution. Some of the updating works — a proto-hippie witchy woman, the grandmother (Julie Christie) now rocks the screen in dreadlocks — but at other times the modern touches feel like sloppiness or even pandering. It’s hard to know, for instance, if Ms. Hardwicke, a former production designer, didn’t notice that the clothing looks straight from the costume department, or whether she (or her producers) didn’t want to turn off their presumptive audience with anything, you know, old.

The introduction of a religious zealot, Father Solomon (Mr. Oldman), adds some busywork drama and action. Summoned to vanquish the computer-generated wolf (an underfed brother to the ludicrous lupine beasts in the “Twilight” franchise), the padre arrives with an armed multicultural entourage and, in a flamboyant touch, a torture chamber cum Easy-Bake Oven shaped like an elephant. (Unlucky prisoners are slow-roasted inside.) At one point Valerie worries with good reason that Father Solomon might mistake her for a witch. But this nod at historic female troubles doesn’t go anywhere, largely because Valerie spends so much time negotiating between dueling loves, Peter and a wealthier suitor, Henry (Max Irons), while juggling her mother, Suzette (Virginia Madsen, rouged and Maybellined), and father, Cesaire (Billy Burke).

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When the wolf in one of Carter’s Red Riding Hood stories explains to the girl why he has big teeth — “All the better to eat you with” — she bursts out laughing. “She knew,” Carter writes, “she was nobody’s meat.” Her insouciance is thrilling. Ms. Hardwicke wants to have her feminism and fairy tale, but Carter’s no-prisoners bad attitude is too far out for an entertainment like “Red Riding Hood,” where only the appearance of girl power will finally do. Given this, it’s worth noting that Ms. Hardwicke, who is deeply enamored of aerial photography, sends the camera repeatedly soaring over the landscape where sometimes a woman in a red cloak as vivid as blood walks with a man across the snowy expanse. It’s a striking image suggestive of freedom, though perhaps it’s really just the guy who this little fairy-tale fugitive needs to escape from.